News

Sustainable Impact

The University of Dayton Hanley Sustainability Institute has made a visible, positive impact on the campus and surrounding community in the two years since its launch.

A seat on the executive committee of a multi-million-dollar institute for sustainability.

Helping oversee energy-saving investments through a $1 million fund for green projects on campus.

Feeding children in two communities for a lifetime.

Those are just some of the opportunities University of Dayton students have through our Hanley Sustainability Institute, established in 2014 with a $12.5 million gift from the foundation of George Hanley '77 and Amanda Hanley.

With the gift, the single-largest in University history, the Hanleys challenged the University to become a national leader for innovation in sustainability education. Since the Institute's launch two years ago, students have been involved in every aspect of the Institute's operation — from staffing and administration to project conception and execution — in keeping with its educational mission.

Meg Maloney, a junior from Chicago who is majoring in environmental biology, was president of the University's Sustainability Club last year when Don Pair, College of Arts and Sciences associate dean for interdisciplinary research and experiential initiatives and acting head of the Institute, invited her to join the Institute's executive committee. As the student representative, she brings her fellow undergraduates' perspective to strategic planning discussions and also helps raise awareness on campus.

"I am always out on campus gauging what people think about the Hanley Sustainability Institute," Maloney said. "I like to bring the things that students are talking about into the meetings, because I think that is important."

Matthew Worsham '15, a Hanley Institute graduate assistant from Loveland, Ohio, is on the advisory committee for the Green Revolving Fund, an initiative built on a 2012 student-led research project. The University invested $1 million to seed the fund, which encourages the campus community to look at the entire campus as a laboratory and testing grounds for energy-saving ideas. Efforts are underway to match the $1 million and grow it annually.

Worsham, who will receive his master's degree in renewable and clean energy in May 2017, is working to expand student engagement with the Green Revolving Fund. In the coming weeks he will bring a group of undergraduates to O'Reilly Hall, office of the College of Arts and Sciences dean, to replace the building's fluorescent lighting with more energy-efficient LED lights. Those students will then use what they learn to similarly upgrade lighting at the Stuart Residence Complex.

"The goal there is not just to make this an energy-savings campaign, but really to expand engagement throughout the UD community in energy issues — especially bringing in students from outside of the traditional energy or sustainability tracks," Worsham said.

The Institute also supports the University's international sustainability efforts, such as funding students Claire Garbsch and Emily Skill for a 10-day service-learning trip to Guatemala with the School of Engineering's ETHOS Center in May. There, the students helped build aquaponics systems for two communities — one to provide food for a boys' orphanage and another for a 16-year-old girl who will sell the fish and the produce the system generates to fund her college education.

Aquaponics involves raising both fish and plants together in one integrated system, explained Garbsch, a junior from Cincinnati who is majoring in dietetics. The fish waste provides an organic food source for the growing plants and the plants provide a natural filter for the water in which the fish live.

"You can harvest the fish and harvest the fresh fruits and vegetables, so everything in the system works together and it's sustainable," Garbsch said. "Both projects were really rewarding."

Skill, a fifth-year student from Oakwood, Ohio, who is majoring in geology with a sustainability minor, also is an intern at the Hanley Sustainability Institute and a resident assistant for the Sustainability Integrated Learning-Living Community. Last year, she was sustainability chair in the Student Government Association.

In addition to benefitting students, the Institute has awarded two rounds of faculty scholarship grants totaling $380,000 to teams from the University of Dayton Research Institute, the School of Business Administration and School of Engineering as well as the College of Arts and Sciences. Fifteen new sustainability course proposals from 11 departments were awarded grants.

The Institute also has hosted sustainability-related conferences and programs including the 2015 Divest-Invest Conference, and co-sponsored recent speaker James Balog, an acclaimed photographer and founder of the Extreme Ice Survey, who spoke last month as part of Sustainability Week and the University Speaker Series.

"The Institute is providing support and leadership in a way that is designed to complement the sustainability education taking place through existing programs and departments," Pair said.

A summary of the Institute's accomplishments during its first two years can be found on its website, or via the related link.

This fall, the Institute will launch an international search for its first executive director, who is scheduled to start in July 2017.

For more information, contact Shawn Robinson, associate director of news and communications, at 937-229-3391 or srobinson@udayton.edu.